In the not too distant past it would have been redundant for the
Democratic National Committee to hire a Catholic Outreach
coordinator. Those duties -- negotiating with a powerful cardinal, lining up
support from an influential union leader, getting out the big-city vote -- were
handled by party chairman whose names (Farley, Flynn, Hannegan, Boyle, McGrath,
McKinney, Bailey, OBrien) read like roll call at an Ancient Order of
Hibernians meeting.

Today, however, the creation of such a job is considered not only
pragmatically essential but symbolically important, a mea culpa of sorts for
neglecting the white ethnics once core to the Democratic base.

A Catholic outreach director will be hired by the Democratic National
Committee as early as this month, rounding out an inside-the-beltway religious
organizing team at the partys Capitol Hill headquarters that includes
staffers devoted to promoting the partys message to Muslims,
African-American churches, mainline Protestants and Jews.

Its the latest indication, say some observers, that Democrats have
learned a key lesson of John Kerrys failed 2004 presidential campaign.
Im very encouraged that the Democratic Party seems more open and
amendable to being inclusive and welcoming to pro-life Democrats like me,
said Raymond Flynn, former mayor of Boston and Bill Clintons ambassador
to the Vatican. Theyve been far more receptive this year than
anytime I can recall.

The last cycle was a wake-up call, said Leslie Brown,
coordinator of the national committees faith in action
effort. When you lose [the Catholic vote] with a Catholic candidate then
youve got to go back and address the problem, she said.

Kerry lost the white Catholic vote to President Bush by 13 points, and
by an even greater margin in the key swing state of Ohio. Which is why Brown
and her boss, committee chair Howard Dean, are not the only Democrats thinking
about Catholics:

Among 1,224 white Catholics surveyed Feb. 23-May 25 on their
preferences for the House of Representatives, 48 percent favor Democrats, while
42 percent favor Republicans, according to Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner polling
data. Thats a 14 point shift from 2004, when Republican candidates
outpolled Democrats among white Catholics by an 8 percent margin. Democrats
need to pick up 15 seats to control the House for the first time since 1994.

Anxious to retake the closely divided Senate, pro-choice Democratic
leaders such as New York Sen. Charles Schumer, chairman of the Democratic
Senatorial Campaign Committee, recruited Pennsylvanias popular pro-life
state treasurer, Robert Casey, to challenge two-term incumbent Rick Santorum.
Casey leads Santorum 49-36 percent, with 12 percent undecided, according to a
Quinnipiac University poll released in early May.

Party leaders put Virginias new Catholic governor, Timothy
Kaine, out front in January. Our faith and values teach us that
theres no higher calling than serving others, Kaine said in his
nationally televised response to the presidents State of the Union
address. On the stump in his 2005 gubernatorial campaign Kaine spoke frequently
of how his faith influenced his policy positions.

Catholic Democrats in the House of Representatives, both pro-life and
pro-choice, issued a Statement of Catholic Principles Feb. 28 (
NCR, March 10). We envision a world in which every child belongs
to a loving family and agree with the Catholic church about the value of human
life and the undesirability of abortion, said the statement, signed by 55
House Democrats. Each of us is committed to reducing the number of
unwanted pregnancies and creating an environment with policies that encourage
pregnancies to be carried to term. We believe this includes promoting
alternatives to abortion, such as adoption, and improving access to
childrens health care and child-care, as well as policies that encourage
paternal and maternal responsibility.

The Catholic House Democrats were responding to prominent members of the
American hierarchy who challenged the pro-choice Kerrys Catholic
credentials in 2004 and, at least by implication, their own standing as
Catholics. It was in response to a characterization of the Catholic
members [of Congress] as basically sinners and nonbelievers, which is not
true, Rep. Charles Gonzalez (D-Texas) told a May 10 forum hosted by the
liberal Center for American Progress on How Catholic Progressives View
the Role of Faith in Governance.

If youre a public official for any appreciable amount of
time there will come a time when there will be public policy issues that will
conflict ... with a particular teaching of the Catholic church, said
Gonzalez.

Mining for values voters

The evolving Democratic strategy to win the Catholic vote is based on
two pillars: engage, and hopefully diffuse, the debate over abortion and other
hot-button social issues while simultaneously broadening the discussion over
values to include issues such as health care, education, the
environment, wages, corporate greed, public corruption, and immigration.

Catholic Democrats are very responsive to a broad initiative to
reduce unwanted pregnancies and the number of abortions even when offered
by a pro-choice legislator, pollster Stanley Greenberg said in a March 2005
memo titled Reclaiming the White Catholic Vote. (Greenberg,
incidentally, is married to Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., primary author of the
Statement of Catholic Principles.)

Democratic polling, said the Democratic National Committees Brown,
demonstrates that the wedge issues from the last [election] cycle are not
what most values-voters identify with. That doesnt mean that these
voters dont have an opinion on the social issues, said Brown,
but that issues such as health care, the economy and Iraq now trump the social
policy concerns.

Further, wrote Greenberg, while division among white Catholics is
an invitation for Republicans to take their cultural war to a new level ...
there is no reason why Democrats should fail to battle for the dislodged
Catholic voters. These voters can be won back, both with reassurance on values
and security and a broader agenda that recognizes Catholic support for
tolerance, progress, a strong family and a strong middle class.

Dealing with the hierarchy

Its one thing, say Democratic strategists, to reach out to
Catholics in the pews, quite another to placate vocal members of the hierarchy
and conservative Catholic opinion-shapers who used their pulpits in 2004 to
challenge Kerry and other pro-choice Catholic office seekers. Party officials
are still spooked by Kerrys run-ins with high-profile bishops and by
attacks from the conservative Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights
against two operatives hired during the campaign.

In early August 2004, the Rev. Brenda Bartella Peterson was forced out
of her post as the national committees director of religious outreach
after the League revealed she had joined 31 other religious leaders in filing a
friend of the court brief in support of removing under God from the
Pledge of Allegiance. Previously, the Kerry campaign silenced religious
outreach coordinator Mara Vanderslice after the Catholic League issued news
releases that labeled her soft on anti-Catholicism because she had engaged in
civil disobedience with, among others, the AIDS activist organization, Act-UP.

The tangling continues.

Speaking at the International Congress on Churches in Mexico City in
November 2005, San Antonio Archbishop Jose Gomez said, This debate
stopped being an abstraction when in the last presidential election one of the
candidates was a Catholic who calls himself devout and who has, however,
defended the most radical positions in favor of abortion. Continued
Gomez, Catholic cannot say that he is Catholic, and at the same time
disagree with the doctrine of the church in essential matters. In order to be a
Catholic, we need to believe like a Catholic, to act like a Catholic and to
speak like a Catholic.

No wonder Gonzalez was nervous when scheduled to meet with Gomez.

We have a new archbishop in San Antonio, Gonzalez, referring
to Gomez, told the May 10 panel on Catholic progressives. It took me
about three months to get up the courage to sit there with him and discuss
things because I knew that I was basically not on the right side of
three major issues. The good news is that we spent very little time on one of
those issues and then spent a lot of time on immigration, [where] obviously
Im right in line with the Catholic church.

The debate over immigration legislation has provided an opening for
Democrats anxious to align themselves with the church hierarchy when they can.
Case in point, the April 28 visit of Cardinals Roger Mahony and Theodore
McCarrick with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Catholic Sens. Edward
Kennedy and Richard Durbin. We need the churchs voice now as much
as ever to urge Congress and the president to get the job done -- and to do it
in a way that upholds our best values and traditions as a nation of
immigrants, Kennedy told the press following that meeting. (Later that
day Mahony and McCarrick, joined by Boston Cardinal Sean OMalley, met
with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and held a similar news conference.)

The Democrats delicate dance with the hierarchy is evident in the
hiring of the national committees Catholic outreach coordinator.

We need someone who will not alienate the institutional
church, said a Democrat familiar with the hiring process. Someone
with credibility who understands how to organize within the church and
understands the politics of [the church] and is able to navigate through that
while also understanding the complexity of the issues in the Democratic
Party.

Meanwhile, with decidedly Democratic roots but a nonpartisan mission,
the newly-formed Catholic Alliance for the Common Good hopes to
take the message promoted by the American bishops in their 2003 statement on
Faithful Citizenship to a broader audience. That statement, which
reiterated Catholic social justice teaching in light of a range of contemporary
issues, was generally welcomed by Democrats. It was, however, supplanted in
many dioceses by a pamphlet distributed by the conservative group
Catholic Answers which emphasized the nonnegotiable
issues, foremost among them abortion, on which Catholic voters should
base their votes.

We hope to promote the faithful citizenship agenda,
especially as we move into the next election cycle, said David
OBrien, professor of history at Holy Cross College and an Alliance board
member. Other board members include Elizabeth Bagley, former Clinton
administration ambassador to Portugal and a major Democratic fundraiser; former
Hillary Clinton chief of staff (and former NCR board member) Melanne
Verveer; former U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops associate general secretary
Frank Doyle; and Pax Christi USA executive director David Robinson.